Roger M McCoy

​      Even in the best conditions riverboats of the nineteenth century faced the hazards of snags, groundings and explosions. As if these hazards were not enough, steamboats soon competed in high risk racing. Racing these boats became popular along with horse racing and dog racing. The public became avid about boat racing, and the crews took great pride in helping their boat win a highly publicized race.
    In many cases, the races were planned in advance, with spectators lining the riverbanks to enjoy the excitement of the race. Others were impromptu events urged on by passengers looking for a little excitement. Steamboat captains competed as a matter of pride and ego and boat owners believed that a record of wins would draw more passengers. Betting on races was widespread with one highly publicized race drawing more the $1,000,000 in wagers (approximately $30,000,000 today).
    Mark Twain commented on the excitement of steamboat racing in his usual vivid style: 
    “Two red-hot steamboats raging along, neck-and-neck, straining every nerve—that is to say, every rivet in the boilers—quaking and shaking and groaning from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes, pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks, parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam—this is sport that makes a body’s very liver curl with enjoyment.” The phrase “straining…every rivet in the boilers…” should be enough to convince anyone that steamboat racing was risky.
    One steamboat race became a major event with thousands of spectators. It was a race between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez steaming from New Orleans to St. Louis.
    The history of the Natchez steamboat shows nine riverboats by that name, the first built in 1823. Fire destroyed the sixth Natchez in 1863. The ninth Natchez, built in 1957, still operates as a tourist attraction in New Orleans.
    The seventh Natchez famous for racing the Robert E. Lee was built in 1869 in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was 301 feet long, had eight boilers and a capacity of 5,500 cotton bales. In her nearly ten years of service, she made 401 trips with no serious accidents. This Natchez had beaten the previous steamboat speed record in 1844 and was a good match for the famous race. 
    The Robert E. Lee was built in the Ohio River town of New Albany, Indiana, in 1866. As it happens there had been two previous steamboats named Robert E. Lee. This stately boat was nicknamed the “Monarch of the Mississippi.” 
    So how did this much-publicized race proceed? It began in New Orleans on June 30th, 1870, with the Robert E. Lee pulling ahead from the beginning and gaining a lead of several hours in the first day. Then both boats began to experience equipment problems. The Robert E. Lee burst a steam pipe the first night allowing the Natchez to come within three minutes of her, the closest margin of the race.  Later the Natchez lost a water pump that cost it thirty minutes. Then it had to stop because of fog for five hours.
    In the end the Robert E. Lee arrived in St. Louis on July 4, 1870 around 11:30 am in the morning; the Natchez followed, arriving at 6:00 pm.  Crowds of people in East St. Louis and St. Louis came to the river banks to watch the arrivals. 
    This famous race had several elements that made it a competition between two boats traveling under very different conditions. Although both boats were comparable in size and power, their captains had different approaches to the race. On board the Robert E. Lee were only seventy-five specially invited guests and no cargo. Captain John W. Cannon outfitted the Lee to race. The Natchez under the command of Captain Thomas Paul Leathers, prepared for a regular trip, taking on board a full complement of passengers and cargo. The Natchez made regular stops for fuel and to unload cargo. Captain Cannon, on the other hand, made arrangements to refuel the Robert E. Lee while underway.
    Thus the Robert E. Lee proceeded while carrying no cargo, steaming ahead through fog and made only one stop, and won the race in 3 days, 18 hours and 14 minutes. By contrast, the Natchez carried her normal load and stopped as normal, tying up overnight when fog was encountered. Despite this she finished the race only six hours later than the Robert E. Lee.
    The race of the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez from New Orleans to St. Louis became immortalized by the prominent lithographers, Currier and Ives, and their well-known print forms the masthead for this series of blogs on nineteenth-century riverboats. Several other paintings of the great race have been made but the Currier and Ives picture is the best known.
    Such racing involved major risks. Steamboat racing became highly popular and sometimes deadly. In some cases the races were planned and advertised in advance, with spectators lining the riverbanks beforehand to enjoy the spectacle. Others were impromptu affairs, sometimes urged on by the passengers and steamboat captains.
    Useful as steamboats were, they came with one big problem: they were inherently dangerous. The steam boilers were prone to exploding and igniting fires. The boats were wooden and much of their cargo was highly flammable cotton bales, along with barrels of turpentine and gunpowder. These hazards came in addition to the snags and submerged bars that could rip a hull open. Between 1816 and 1848, boiler explosions alone killed more than 1,800 passengers and crew and injured another 1,000, and racing added significantly to the chance for an explosion. In 1965 noted historian and prolific writer Daniel Boorstin commented,  “A voyage on the Mississippi was far more dangerous than a passage across the ocean.” 
    A nineteenth-century humorist, Charles Godfrey Leland, said much the same about steamboat racing. “From the days of the Romans and Norsemen down to the present time, there was never any form of amusement discovered so daring, so dangerous, and so exciting as a steamboat race,”
     Such racing is, of course, inevitable given the human inclination to compete, to demonstrate their skill, and show the superiority of their boat.
    
Sources:
Discover Indiana. https://publichistory.iupui.edu/items/show/146

Springfield Museum. Springfield, Massachusetts The Great Mississippi Steamboat Race From New Orleans to St. Louis, July 1870, Currier & Ives. 
https://springfieldmuseums.org/collections/item/the-great-mississippi-steamboat-race-from-new-orleans-to-st-louis-july-1870-currier-ives/

Thomas, Christian. For Profit and Glory: Steamboat racing on the inland rivers. https://www.howardsteamboatmuseum.org/river-history/for-profit-glory-steamboat-racing-inland-rivers/

Twain, Mark. 1885. Life on the Mississippi. retrieved from: Gutenberg Books, https://www.museum.state.il.us /RiverWeb/landings/Ambot/SOCIETY/SOC8.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee_(steamboat)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natchez_(boat)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-deadly-steamboat-races-enthralled-america-180982038/

    In the early nineteenth century steam-powered riverboats were the major form of transportation for people and cargos in three immense river basins in the young United States: the Mississippi River, the Ohio River, and the Missouri River.  Also canals connected cities like New York and Chicago to the great river network of mid-America until railroads provided better and faster service in the mid-nineteenth century. The size of many nineteenth-century riverboats was a problem in itself. Some steamers were so long, over 200 feet, that they undulated with the waves as they traveled despite beams and braces to help keep the boat rigid. A passenger noted that you could see the wave coming down the length of the boat.
    The riverboats were not without risk and they often met with disaster  by hitting submerged objects such as fallen trees or sandbars. Either of these hazards could break open the hull, although the sandbar in some cases only grounded the boat temporarily.
    The disaster most feared by the traveling public aboard a nineteenth- century riverboat was boiler explosions. The explosion of the riverboat Sultana on the Mississippi River had such a high death toll that public pressure forced Congress to enact the nation’s first transportation safety act.
     Author Charles Dickens visited America in 1842 and traveled by riverboat on the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. As he learned more about the boats he observed, “…steamboats usually blow up one or two a week in the season.” Such knowledge, however, did not deter the number of people traveling on riverboats, or reduce cargo shipments.             
      Boat builders valued the importance of good weight distribution. To achieve this they put the boilers near the front—the bow—and the machinery in the middle or at the stern. They attempted to stiffen the long framework of the hull with trusses and long iron rods. Unfortunately putting the boilers near the bow paved the way for death and destruction for thousands of passengers whose cabins were located on the deck above the boilers. Passengers lives were never in greater jeopardy than when they stood on the upper decks while watching workers loading cargo at a landing. Many explosions occurred at landings due to the increase of pressure when the engines were stopped.
    The first recorded explosion on a Mississippi River steamer was in 1816. The steam pipe on the Washington burst and nine men were scalded to death. In the following year the Constitution blew up, and thirty lives were lost.  Over time a frightful toll of boats and lives occurred on steamboats.    
    Congress began moving to regulate steamboat boilers. In 1849 a list of 233 explosions on river steamers was compiled for the purpose of informing Congress on the question of steamboat boilers. The list showed that, as nearly as could be ascertained, 2,563 lives were lost and 2,007 persons injured in the explosions, a total of 4,660. The property loss was placed at $3,090,360 (1.2 billion today).
    One important riverboat, the Sultana, set records when it exploded on the Mississippi River in 1865, only a few weeks after the end of the Civil War. At the time of the explosion the Sultana was carrying an estimated 2000 Union soldiers who had been held in Confederate prisoner of war camps (for comparison, the Titanic disaster took 1503 lives). Many of the returning soldiers came from Confederate hospitals or prisons in poor condition and disabled. 
     ​The Sultana was docked in Vicksburg for boiler repairs when it’s Captain, Cass Mason, heard that the U.S. government would pay an attractive sum to transport soldiers ($90 each). He decided a thorough repair of the boiler would cause him to miss this opportunity, so he ordered a quick and temporary fix. In order to take maximum advantage of the government offer, Captain Mason also accepted many more soldiers than the Sultana was designed to carry.     While underway one of the Sultana’s boilers exploded a few miles north of Memphis, Tennessee at approximately 2 a.m. on April 27, 1865.      
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       The ​explosion instantly killed hundreds, especially those soldiers who had been packed in right against the boilers. Many of them died from shrapnel, steam, and boiling water released from the explosion. Those on deck either went down with the boat of jumped into the river. Those who were able grasped a scrap of a board to stay afloat, and those who knew how to swim might make it to shore or stay afloat for a few hours until the rescue boat arrived. Unfortunately there were few survivors. 
    Among the survivors was a young soldier from Michigan named Hosea Aldrich who described the chaos and confusion after the explosion,
          “…the first thing that I heard was a terrible crash,
           everything seemed to be falling. The things I had under
           my head, my shoes, and some other articles and
           specimens that I had gathered up and had them tied up
           in an old pair of drawers, they all went down through the
           floor. We scrambled back. The smoke came rushing up
           through the passage made by the exit of the exploded
           boiler. 
                 I was pushed in the water and started for the bottom
           of the Mississippi, but I soon rose to the surface and
           found a small piece of board, and soon had the luck of
           getting a larger board, which was very lucky for me, as
           I could not swim. 
                 We floated along down the river nearly an hour I think
           when my limbs began to cramp; that was the last of
           which I was conscious until at eight o'clock a.m. We had
           floated down the river six miles and lodged in the
           flood-wood against an island which was within two
           miles of Memphis, and here we were picked up by the
​           United States picket boat.”
    
​      Another writer named Jerry Potter wrote: 
                    “It was a particularly bad day to be out on the
            water. The Mississippi River was experiencing high
            water levels as melting snow from up north flooded its
            banks. Fallen trees and other debris mixed into the
            fast-moving waterways.
                    It was difficult to navigate these clogged and
            swirling waters come nightfall, but Captain Mason
            was determined to make his shipment of soldiers.
            Several miles from Memphis, Tennessee, one of the
            Sultana’s boilers exploded. Because the boat had been
            so packed, many of the passengers were crammed
            right by the boilers. The explosion instantly killed
            hundreds, mostly soldiers from Kentucky and
            Tennessee who had been packed in right against
            the boilers. Many of them instantly died from
            shrapnel, steam, and the boiling water released
            from the explosion.
                      One minute they were sleeping and the next
            they found themselves struggling to swim in the
            very cold Mississippi River. Some passengers burned
            on the boat.
                      The fortunate ones clung to debris in the river,
            or to horses and mules that had escaped the boat,
            hoping to make it to shore, which they could not see
            because it was dark and the flooded river was at that
            point almost five miles wide.”
     All these passengers aboard the Sultana were torn between two choices: stay on the boat and die from the fire or jump into the water and possibly drown. Soldiers just out of war again found themselves fighting for their lives. Fortunately passing boats and local residents began a rescue operation to save the soldiers.  One local man, John Fogelman and his sons made a raft from some logs and went to the flaming Sultana to rescue passengers. They made several rescue trips back to the burning boat. 
    One soldier from Ohio noted, “When I came to my senses I found myself surrounded by wreckage, and in the midst of smoke and fire. The agonizing shrieks and groans of the injured and dying were heart-rending, and the stench of burning flesh was intolerable and beyond my power of description.” 
    Within a few hours the Sultana went to the bottom of the Mississippi. One curious feature of this disaster is that some of the rescuers, who were defeated Confederate soldiers only a few weeks earlier, now saved the lives of their former enemy.
    The cause of the Sultana explosion can be laid on Captain Mason. His neglect of equipment and refusal to make adequate repairs plus his eagerness to make a bundle of money cost many lives.

Sources:
Young, David. Roiling on the River. Chicago Tribune 2003. Retrieved from: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2003-01-12-0301120511-story.html

Berry, Chester D.  Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors. Lansing, Michigan: Darius D. Thorp, Printer and Binder. 1892.

Comstock, Daniel W. Ninth Cavalry: One Hundredth and Twenty-first Regiment Volunteers. Richmond, Indiana: J.M. Coe Publisher. 1890.  Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60363/60363-h/60363-h.htm    

Larry Holzwarth.  See 1842 America Through Charles Dickens’ Eyes. Retrieved from: https://historycollection.com/see-1842-america-through-charles-dickens-eyes/13/ 

Aldrich, Hosea C. and Hatch, Absalom N. Returning Prisoners of War. Michigan Family History Network. Retrieved from: http://www. mifamilyhistory.org/civilwar/sultana. 1865.

Roger McCoy

     In the early years of the nineteenth century the increasing demands for transport of cargo, and movement of people turned many inventors’ attention to the practical use of steam power for river navigation. Their goal was to achieve speedier means of transportation. 
    A few efforts to invent a steamboat in the eighteenth century proved to be more experimental than practical. One such effort was that of John Fitch who built a 45-foot boat that steamed up the Delaware River in 1787. His boats utilized ranks of paddles that worked in unison on both sides of the boat similar to a big canoe. Fitch’s boat was operational mechanically, but was so expensive to build that he failed to interest investors who saw little chance for adequate return. Fitch failed to pay sufficient attention to construction and operating costs and was unable to justify the economic benefits of steam navigation. He soon had to abandon his project.
    James Rumsey also designed a functional steam-powered riverboat in 1787, the same year as Fitch, and twenty years before Fulton. Unfortunately, Rumsey died before he had raised enough money to build the boat. Clearly the time for riverboats had arrived by the end of the eighteenth century.  
    
     Robert Fulton (1765-1815) built his first boat after Fitch's death, and it was Fulton who became known as the inventor of the steam-powered riverboat. This boat, the Clermont, was both reliable and practical. Thus, Robert Fulton was the first to achieve success by building a practical steam-powered riverboat suitable for carrying both cargo and passengers.
    Fulton was born on a farm in Pennsylvania in 1765. When a very young man, he moved to Philadelphia where he painted portraits and landscapes. He did well, was able to send money to his mother, and eventually bought a farm near Pittsburgh where he lived with his family and his mother.
    At the age of twenty-three, Fulton traveled to Europe, where he lived for the next twenty years. He went to England in 1786, carrying letters of introduction from prominent Philadelphians. He had already corresponded with American artist Benjamin West, a close friend of Fulton’s father. West was the chief historical painter under the patronage of King George III. West took Fulton into his home, where Fulton lived for several years and studied painting. He gained many commissions painting portraits and landscapes, which allowed him to support himself. At the same time he continued to experiment with mechanical inventions.
    While in England Fulton also noticed the active canal system that carried all kinds of cargo throughout the country, and he became caught up in the English enthusiasm for canals. At that time the British canal boats were towed by horses or mules, and Fulton saw the potential for using the steam engine which had been invented by James Watt a few years earlier. His interest in art soon gave way to an interest in improving canal navigation. When he returned to America, Fulton focussed his interest in canal transportation on creating a boat suitable for river transportation. For this ground-breaking effort he became famous.
    In 1803, only four years before Fulton built his new boat, a Frenchman built a steam-powered river boat which broke in two and sank from the weight of the engine and machinery. Fulton went to Paris to help raise the sunken boat and study its flaws. On returning to America Fulton received money from a rich benefactor, Robert Livingston, and proceeded to design and build a boat that could bear the weight of the machinery and also carry cargo. He called his new boat the Clermont after the name of Livingston’s home on the Hudson River. The Clermont measured 130 feet long and eighteen feet wide. It had a mast and sail for addition push during good wind conditions. On each side of the Clermont, fully exposed paddle wheels fifteen feet in diameter propelled the boat through the water.
    One morning in August, 1807, a throng of expectant people gathered on the banks of the Hudson River at New York, to see the trial of the Clermont. Most people thought Fulton’s idea was unworkable and they expected failure. People had all along spoken of Fulton as a crackpot dreamer, and had called the Clermont "Fulton's Folly.” One quote at the time was, “Any man with common-sense knows it won’t work.” So while Fulton was waiting to give the signal to start, the crowd was making wisecracks and poking fun at his certain failure.
    Finally at the signal, the Clermont moved slowly, and then stood perfectly still. Skeptics jeered his failure and made “I told you so” remarks. But they spoke too soon, for after a little adjustment of the machinery, the Clermont steamed proudly up the Hudson River.
    As the boat continued her journey crowds of people stood along the river watching the strange sight. Some reports say that when other boatmen on the Hudson, heard the clanking machinery and saw the great sparks of fire and the volumes of dense, black smoke rising out of the funnel, they thought an evil thing had happened. One man told his wife that he had seen the devil coming up the river on a raft.
    The Clermont traveled 150 miles from New York to Albany in thirty-two hours. Success had at last rewarded Robert Fulton for his strong common-sense and determination. The Clermont was the first steamboat of real practical use ever invented. From that time men soon saw the immeasurable advantage of steam navigation for commercial transport on lakes and rivers.
    The Clermont was Fulton's last work. Fulton died in 1815 in New York City from tuberculosis, then called consumption. He had been walking home on the frozen Hudson River when one of his friends, fell through the ice. In rescuing his friend, Fulton got soaked with icy water. He is believed to have contracted pneumonia. When he got home, his sickness worsened. He was diagnosed with consumption and died at 49 years old, eight years after rendering an untold service to the industrial welfare of his country.

Roger McCoy    
THE ENGINE ROOM
    The nineteenth-century riverboats were works of art as well as being the workhorse of the Mississippi River system. We’ve seen many pictures of riverboats without having much detailed knowledge about them. It would be appropriate at this time to see how the boats were constructed and operated.
    These boats were made primarily of wood with some iron reinforcements in the hulls of the larger boats. The length varied greatly from as short as forty feet to some monsters nearly 300 feet long. Their width ranged from ten feet to as much as eighty feet. Even such a large boat had a very shallow draft allowing them to travel in very shallow water of one to five feet deep even when loaded. This meant that even the larger boats could still dock with the bow pointing into the river bank if necessary and lower a gangplank to shore for loading people and cargo. It was commonly said that they could "navigate on a heavy dew." 
​     The overall design of the bigger boats included an internal structure of iron trusses below the main deck to prevent the long hulls from sagging.  Above this structure additional decks provided cabins and passenger areas. Everything except the iron trusses was constructed from wood…stairs, galleys, and parlors. Many riverboats carried cargo with only limited room for passengers, but others focussed on passengers and became quite ornate with expensive wood trim, velvet, plush chairs, gilt edging, and other trimmings, depending on the owner's taste and budget. 
    The construction of the engine room usually placed wood-burning boilers midship to distribute weight more evenly. To the rear of the boiler was the piston engine, also called a reciprocating engine. The piston engine had a cylinder with one steam jet pushing the piston down and another steam jet pushing the cylinder back up again with a flywheel to help maintain a smooth motion. 
    Where does steam get its energy to push pistons up and down? Would heated air also do the job? The short answer is that any gas expands when heated, but water vapor at a boiling temperature (steam) expands six times as much as air heated to the same temperature. When the steam is in a confined spaced and not allowed to expand then the pressure is increased, and the pressure of the confined steam is six times greater than air in the same conditions. Thus when steam is confined in the boiler then injected into the cylinder the high pressure steam will push the piston. When the piston moves the volume is increased and the steam’s energy is spent and released into the atmosphere through a vent.
     An Englishman named Robert Boyle worked out the relationship of temperature and volume of gasses in the in the seventeenth century. Thomas Savery is credited with inventing the first practical steam engine In 1698. Miners used his engine to drive pumps to remove ground water that seeped into mines.  
    The steamboat engines could be either at midship (for side-wheelers) or at the stern (stern-wheelers). Two rudders were added to steer the ship. These boats had surprisingly short periods of operation due to hazards such as hull damage by snags and hidden sand bars, poor maintenance, fires, general wear and tear, or the explosion of a boiler. It is estimated that an average time of operation was only five years.
    In the early days of riverboats, trips up the Mississippi River from New Orleans took three weeks to St Louis. Later, with better pilots, more powerful engines and boilers, and experienced boatmen who knew the location of sandbars, that figure was greatly reduced. Collisions, snags, and explosions, however, remained constant dangers.
    A few men who worked the steamboats took the time to write about their experience, which has provided great insight for us today.    Most people know of Mark Twain and his experience as a riverboat pilot. Another man, George Merrick, also wrote about his life on a riverboat in every capacity from the hard labor in the engine room to eventually becoming a riverboat pilot himself. Although not so eloquent and entertaining as Twain, Merrick actually gives more detail about the interior operations and the functions of each crew member on the boat.
    He writes that the vital core of the riverboat was the engine room and the engineer responsible for its operation. Like many career boatmen Merrick started as a “cub” (trainee) in the engine room. Work in the engine-room had the worst working conditions on the boat with heat and steam from the boiler filling the room. Merrick writes that:
    A drawback in the life of a cub engineer was the fact that when in port there was no let-up of work. In fact the worst part came then. In port the pilots were at liberty until the hour of sailing; not so with the engineers. As soon as the fires were drawn, the water let out of the boilers, the process of cleaning began.
    Being a slim lad one of my duties is to creep into the boilers through the manhole. With a hammer and a sharp-linked chain I must “scale” the boilers by pounding on the two large flues with the hammer, and dragging the saw-chain around until all the accumulated mud and sediment is loosened. [ NOTE: The sediment accumulated from silt in the river water that was drawn to fill the boilers.]
    Merrick describes in great detail the work of the various crewmen working in the engine room. He explained that the boats had two engineers. The first engineer had many years of experience and was responsible for the proper maintenance and operation of the machinery. The second engineer did much of the work maintaining the engines, and keeping the boilers supplied with enough water to prevent overheating and possible explosions. Several assistants or trainees might  also work in the engine room.
    After a stint in this difficult and dirty job Merrick asked about a different job away from the engine room. Apparently he had done a suitable job in the engine room as his request was granted and he  replaced the second office clerk who recently had a disabling injury. 
    Everything changed for the better when Merrick became second clerk, called the “mud clerk.”  
        “As second clerk all these conditions were changed. In the absence of the chief clerk, his assistant took charge of the office, answered all questions of passengers, issued tickets for passage and staterooms, showed people about the boat, and in a hundred ways made himself agreeable, and so far as possible ministered to their comfort and happiness while on board. The reputation of a passenger boat depended greatly upon the esteem in which the captain, clerks, and pilots were held by the traveling public. The fame of such a crew was passed along from one tourist to another, until the gentle accomplishments of a boat's personnel were as well known as their official qualifications.” 
    Merrick eventually worked up through the ranks to the much coveted job of pilot. In the process of following his career we learn much about the operation of the iconic riverboats of the Mississippi River.

Sources: 
     Merrick, George. Old Times on the Upper Mississippi: The Recollections of a Steamboat Pilot
​          from 1854 to 1863. Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur Clark, Company. 1909.
    Old Times on the Upper Mississippi: The Recollections of a Steamboat Pilot from 1854 to 1863.
    Retrieved from: gutenberg.org/cache/epub/47262/pg47262-images.
   Retrieved from: wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboats of the Mississippi: 
    Construction of the vessels.

Roger M. McCoy
     Water routes soon became as important as wagon trails for migration and the movement of goods in the nineteenth century. With the increased use of waterways also came a proliferation of river boats of many designs and purposes. This series of blogs explores the development and use of river boats on the inland waterways: types of boats, men who invented them, first person accounts of men who stoked the fires, handled the loads, and piloted the boats, along with all the hazards of river travel and some of the notable ship wrecks. First, let’s look at the fortunate geography of rivers in the United States and how they became major routes for developing the land.
    The Mississippi River provides an extensive waterway that stretches from the southernmost to the northernmost extremities of the United States from the Gulf of Mexico in the south and pointing toward Canada at the north end. From the east the Ohio River, with its tributaries stretching to the Allegheny range in the central Appalachians, flows into the Mississippi. The largest of the Ohio River tributaries, the Tennessee River, drains most of Tennessee plus part of northern Alabama, Georgia, and western Virginia.  From the west the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers flow eastward out of the Rocky Mountains joining the Mississippi. The total area drained by the Mississippi River system covers forty-percent of the 48 contiguous states, much of which is agricultural or rangeland.
     This immense river basin was viewed very early as a vital corridor for an expanding empire, and for a century the three great rivers (Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri Rivers) served as major routes for movement into the new land that became the United States. President Thomas Jefferson was among those who saw the potential of the vast land and sent Lewis and Clark on an expedition in 1804 to explore and map the region. John Frémont, John Powell, Edward Steptoe, and others continued the great western mapping project. 
    With the addition in 1825 of the Erie Canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson River, it became possible to travel by boat from New York to Lake Michigan. Later a 96 mile-long Illinois and Michigan Canal was built from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. When that was completed in 1848 it was possible to transport goods by river and canal from New York City to the Gulf of Mexico and all points between without using a seagoing vessel and avoiding the hazards of sea travel.
    The young nation was now connected from its northern border to the Gulf Coast and eastward to New York. Explorers and trappers traveled westward via the Missouri River to the Northern Rockies very early, but the Missouri was considered a more dangerous route for larger boats because of its strong currents, snags, and sandbars.
    From the beginning of U.S. history the Mississippi was seen as the single most important river on the American continent. Its 1,245,000 square-mile drainage basin covers most of the central plains of the United States from the Appalachians to the Rockies. It became an essential waterway considered vital to the ambitions of an expanding nation and the key to what many called “Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, espoused the idea that the United States was destined by God to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. It became a rallying cry in the mid-nineteenth century for westward expansion and the river routes in the mid-continent were an essential component of that expansion. People and goods could travel on rivers and canals from New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Tennessee to the Gulf of Mexico or west into the northern Rocky Mountains, including present day Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. 
    
​      In the beginning the only means of river travel was on rafts, flatboats, or keel boats, but they required poling or rowing and moved very slowly, especially when moving upstream. Many men earned money poling cargo rafts down the Mississippi, including young Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Fortunately that difficult mode of travel was soon to change. 
    A first effort at steam-powered boats was made in 1787 by American John Finch who constructed a boat with eight steam-powered oars on each side. Finch’s steamboat never progressed beyond the experimental stage before it was superseded by a more practical steamboat designed  by Robert Fulton. 
    A New York City inventor and engineer, Robert Fulton became interested in steam power while visiting England, where he saw the steam engine invented by James Watt in 1776. After seeing the Watt engine, Fulton returned to the U.S. and in 1807 applied a steam engine of similar design to a boat, the Clermont, creating the world’s first commercially successful steamboat with a paddle wheel. Although Fulton’s steamboat first traveled only the Hudson River Valley, the potential for steamboats on the great interior river system became immediately apparent.
    Since that time the Mississippi and its tributaries have become important routes for cargo to and from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Omaha, Nebraska, Minneapolis, MInnesota, down to New Orleans and all points between. Canals connect the Great Lakes into the system via the Illinois River and eastward to New York via the Hudson River or along the St Lawrence River to the Atlantic.